Wednesday, September 4, 2013

On Piety: Egypt, Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood

I've got a short essay up at The Revealer about the current violence in Egypt. Writing this involved digging back through some of the anthropological studies I pored over while writing my thesis on sound in Cairo in 2010.

“The first thing he asked me was to make wearing the headscarf mandatory in Egypt,” said Gamel Abdel Nasser, addressing a crowd from behind a bank of microphones. The first Egyptian president was describing a meeting with the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953. At this point their relationship was still cordial, although his government would later arrest and torture members of the movement.